Former NBA All-Star Jayson Williams got tased by the cops 4 am Monday morning in a lower Manhattan hotel room after his female companion called 911 saying Jay was acting suicidal. When the police arrived they found prescription drug bottles and several suicide notes strewn around and said that Jay clearly impaired. He got tased after resisting officers trying to take him to the hospital. Jayson is awaiting sentencing after being convicted of trying to cover-up the 2004 shooting death of limo driver Costas Christofsi . According to testimony, Jayson was showing a group of people around his NJ estate. When they got to the master bedroom Jay pulled out a rifle that when slammed shut, went off, blasting 55 year old Chritofsi in the chest. According to witnesses, Jayson then placed the gun in the dead man’s hands, stripped off all his clothes and jumped into his swimming pool. Jayson’s defense was that he panicked. He was acquitted of aggravated manslaughter, but the jury deadlocked on a reckless-manslaughter count. A retrial is pending, and he has been free on bail since the shooting. He’s apologized to Christofi’s relatives and given them $2.5 million to settle a civil suit. He could be sentenced to several years in prison on the cover-up conviction, but a judge ruled he wouldn’t be sentenced until after the retrial. He is also being divorced by his wife.

A Dallas police officer drew his gun during a traffic stop of Houston Texans running back Ryan Moats last week in which the officer kept Moats from going to the hospital room of his dying mother-in-law, the Dallas Morning News reported. According to the report, the officer, identified as Robert Powell, stopped the vehicle being driven by Moats in the hospital parking lot for going through a red light. Powell later told his superiors that he drew his gun but did not point it at anyone, according to the Morning News. Moats’s wife and another relative ignored Powell’s command to stop and went inside the hospital, and Moats’s wife reportedly was by her mother’s bedside when she died. Ryan Moats and another man remained outside while Powell lectured Moats, wrote a ticket and threatened to arrest him even after being told that by Moats that his mother-in-law was near death inside the hospital. After a delay of about 13 minutes, according to the Morning News, Powell allowed Moats to go inside the hospital, that after hospital staff members and another police officer interceded. Moats’s mother-in-law, Jonetta Collinsworth, already had died by the time Moats arrived at her room, according to the report. Dallas police department officials have issued an apology and have reassigned Powell to dispatch pending an investigation, according to the Morning News.

73 year old Bernard Monroe was shot and killed by white police officers on his front porch in front of his family and friends. Mr. Monroe, a retired utility worker, was hosting a bar-b-que in the front yard of his Homer, Louisiana home for his children, dozens of grandchildren and great-grandchildren and friends when two white police officers pulled up in front of his house. The sight of of the cop car brought a hush to the yard and moments later Mr. Monroe was dead.

After the cop car rolled to a stop one of the officers called out to one of Mr. Monroe’s sons. The son, who has been arrested in the past but did not have any pending warrants, got up and ran into the house. One of the officers, a two week rookie, jumped out of the cop car and chased the young man into the house. Mr. Monroe, who could not speak because of a bout with throat cancer, got up from a chair in the yard and advanced to his porch. At that point, the unarmed man was shot through the screen of his front door.

“He just shot him through the screen door,” said Denise Nicholson, a family friend who said she was standing a few feet away. “After [Monroe] was on the ground, we kept asking the officer to call an ambulance, but all he did was get on his radio and say, ‘Officer in distress.’ ”

What happened next is chilling. Witnesses say the second officer picked up a handgun that Mr. Monroe, an avid hunter, always kept in plain sight on the porch for protection. Using a latex glove, the officer grasped the gun by its handle, the witnesses said, and ordered everyone to back away. The next thing they said they saw was the gun next to Monroe’s body.”I saw him pick up the gun off the porch,” Marcus Frazier said. “I said, ‘What are you doing?’ The cop told me, ‘Shut the hell up, you don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ”

“People here are afraid of the police,” said Terry Willis, vice president of the Homer branch of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. “They harass black people, they stop people for no reason and rough them up without charging them with anything.”

“That is how it should be, responded Homer Police Chief Russell Mills, who noted the high rates of gun and drug arrests in the neighborhood. “If I see three or four young black men walking down the street, I have to stop them and check their names,” said Mills, who is white. “I want them to be afraid every time they see the police that they might get arrested.”